


The Devil is in the Data

by didsomeonesayventus



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Gen, Other
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-27
Updated: 2015-12-27
Packaged: 2018-05-09 17:05:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,991
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5548424
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/didsomeonesayventus/pseuds/didsomeonesayventus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A prison of zeroes and ones is still a prison no matter how heavenly it is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Riku stood above Sora’s knocked out body. Sweat laced with salt slipped down his brow and over scrapes and cuts in a dull sting. A spell was busy meandering through his body and tweaking this and that and bringing Riku back to Riku but it still hurt to breathe. His hands had streams of his own blood coagulating on them, and a few knuckles were split open from the punch that was now causing a sickly pallor of purples and yellows to blossom on Sora’s jaw.

“We’re never doing this again.” Riku muttered.

Kairi shook her head as she grabbed Sora and slumped him against the wall, “I wish we could say that.”

“We’re never doing this again.” Riku said once more, firmer, growling.

“But Riku,” Kairi held her fingers to Sora’s neck for a moment, then ran her hand through his wild hair streaked with brown, blond, and grey, “He could... H-he could snap like that again. As long as he has a piece of.... As long as that creep.... Until we find a way to get him back he’s a ticking bomb winding down until next time he tries to kill us.” One of her eyes was swollen black. She held her arm gingerly. Her dress was red in too many places. Riku was not the only one recovering from the fight.

Riku bent down and picked Sora up, carrying him away from Kairi. To her protest, she followed him in a limping gait that could have been a speed walk, “Riku, We can’t keep him here if he’s just going to explode-”

“We need him to find the cure-”

“But we can’t keep him here forever! And I trust Sora as much as anyone else here and more but what if Master Xehanort’s using him to get the upper hand on us?!”

“And what if Master Xehanort can’t find him?” Riku set Sora down on King Mickey’s desk, next to an odd contraption Chip and Dale had made long before this crisis to solve a much more trivial dilemma. Riku set to work typing up codes and commands, “What if Sora’s no longer a blip on the radar, gone without a trace?”

Kairi sat down in the mouse-king’s chair, watching Sora with a furrowed brow and folded hands. She looked to Riku, “You can’t be serious, hide Sora in the Datascape?! What about Maleficent then? She’s constantly trying to kidnap that and we could just lose him again to-”

“Not exactly the Datascape.” Riku corrected Kairi, “I’m making a simulation to run parallel to it. It’ll draw a lot of the data for the A.I. from the journal- which I’m updating now -but it’ll be mostly independent of it otherwise. We’ll keep Sora in it and he won’t know a thing, and we’re not gonna let him know he’s in a simulation, but we can observe and interact enough to buy us time to get him back to normal.”

Kairi watched their beloved islands taking shape on the screen, then the two of them being put into place for companionship. She watched Riku create their twins of Data to smile, to say nothing’s wrong, that Master Xehanort was long dead and all of this was just a nightmare-

“Riku, do you think he’s gonna hate us for this?” Kairi whispered.

The tapping of keys stopped. “What makes you say that?”

“We’re just feeding him all kinds of saccharine lies, throwing him into this machine to get him to forget and ignore he’s going through hell right now. Nothing’s alright. We’re a couple Lights short, Xehanort’s always one step ahead and a parasite in his heart...” Kairi paused for a long time. “He’s gonna know something’s up.”

Riku went back to typing. When the time came to update Sora, he stopped and read over what had been placed there. An account of all his adventures, from the first all the way ‘till.... until...

“CURRENT STATUS: POSSESSED BY XEHANORT AS THE THIRTEENTH VESSEL OF DARKNESS”

Riku deleted that entire sentence, Kairi stiffening and blanching at the sight. “Riku what are you doing?! He gets enough denial in on his own and we don’t need to fabricate more of it!”

Riku typed in a new sentence, “CURRENT STATUS: SAFE AND SOUND AT HOME, SMILING EXACTLY AS HE ALWAYS HAS WITH HIS FRIENDS.”

Riku felt the scrapes and cuts on his cheeks stinging even more. His puffy eyes made it hard to see the screen properly and his frown was hard enough to leave a lingering ache. His throat squeezed and his breath wheezed.

Kairi stood and hugged him, her small, delicate hands suddenly on his chest, “I know... I know, I miss him, too.”

“It’s not fair...” Riku wept, “We tried so hard- I tried so hard...”

“It’s not fair at all.” Kairi agreed, “That sleazeball needs to get those stupid, ADHD hands off of Sora’s heart right now.”

“I miss him.” Riku’s voice rose in pitch like a violin, grating and mournful.

“I miss him, too.” Kairi said again, burying her face in Riku’s back. “Everyone misses him.”

“I don’t feel like a person anymore, I feel incomplete.” Riku cried.

“Same.” Kairi mumbled, voice soft and largely indifferent save the sympathetic and doleful waver.

Riku typed up a little more code, using a texture pack to gently restore the color to Sora’s hair, shed that wretched coat, and his eyes... His eyes could not be done justice but at least they could be blue again. Another hour passed as he dove into the Datascape himself to do some debugging, leaving Kairi to watch over Sora until they plunged this living, breathing, erratic human being into a world made of rules and code and ones and zeroes where logic reigned supreme no matter how hard you tried to cover it up.

...

_PROGRAM SEARCH: Destiny_Islands_SoraSim.exe_

_PROGRAM FOUND_

_... LOADING SIMULATION ..._

_RUN DESTINY ISLANDS SIMULATOR?_

_> Yes No_

_... LOADING SIMULATION ..._

_... LOADING A.I. ..._

_... INTRODUCING USER ..._

_~* WELCOME USER: SORA *~_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> INSPIRED BY RXCUSANT OVER ON TUMBLR!! tbh I took a few liberties here and there with what they originally planned but I'm hoping this still sounds good and engaging. I had fun with it though! And next chapter is how Sora handles this all so that's gonna be fun


	2. Chapter 2

Sora was aware of darkness. Then his limbs and then his heart. And seagulls? And waves....

He opened his eyes, the sun hurling spears of light into them. He winced and blinked. He knew that blue sky, cyan towards the horizon and fading to a light indigo at the center of the heavens, he’d only stared at it for at least 14-15 years of his life; give or take the wild and unpredictable amount of time he spent adventuring.

This was home.

Home?

His bleary, half asleep senses suddenly burned with fear. Alarms went off in his head. His heart beat wildly in his chest, begging to just leave the paradise behind, and he stiffened against the sand. He wasn’t supposed to be home yet, why was he home-

A migraine worthy of Athena’s birth split Sora’s head, and he bolted up to grab it-

“OW! Sora what the heck!”

His forehead promptly smacked into Kairi. After pausing a moment to let the pain subside, he turned around to see her wiping blood from her nose with a joke, “Wow, Riku’s right, you really do have a thick head!”

Sora blinked. He sat there on his knees, slack jawed, brow knotted, as Kairi laughed and patched herself up. Just like good ol’ days... No this wasn’t supposed to be happening. Sora was SURE this was all some crazy dream, a prelude to a nightmare or maybe just a moment of respite from it.

But what was the nightmare then? The answer was on the tip of his tongue, behind the darkness of his eyelids, in the way his stomach clenched and how his heart kept screaming, but none of it could be translated into a clear answer. Something was wrong and the hairs on his neck stood alert.

“Sora, you okay?” Kairi asked, “You’ve been staring for awhile now...”

He finally spoke, “W-what’s goin’ on?”

Kairi laughed some more, teasingly deriding, “Oh come on, Sora! Are you really that spaced out?”

“Kairi what’s going on?!” Sora asked, more urgent, “I’m serious!”

Kairi’s smile faded. She tilted her head, “Sora, are you okay?”

“Not really.” Sora looked at the sand. He buried his hands in it. Warm. Grainy. The weight on his fingers was a reassuring heft. “I’m... confused.”

“You’re always confused about somethin’.” Kairi shrugged, “I’m sure it’s not that bad.”

“I-I’m not supposed to be here...” Sora muttered, “This is wrong, I shouldn’t be home I shouldn’t be with you-”

“Sora are you having flashbacks?” Kairi suddenly squatted next to him, holding his shoulders, “You’re home. You’ve been home for probably a year now.” Sora kept looking at the mounds of sand that were his hands. Kairi held his chin and forced him to look at her, “Sora, you’re home.”

Her eyes were blue. The deepest indigo blue like the night sky peppered with stars. Her cheeks were rosy and soft. Her hair was red. A red that spilled carelessly over the night sky like blood _like blood **like blood-**_

“It’s still wrong...” Sora whispered.

Kairi sat criss-cross in front of Sora with a sigh, then took his hands from the sand to her own. “Sora,” she said, “let’s go over what we know.”

“I’m not supposed to be here.” Sora said for the umpteenth time.

“We defeated Master Xehanort about a year ago,” Kairi’s tone was even, firm, factual.

“I’m not supposed to be here-”

“You’re the hero of the Realm of Light,”

“Kairi please I don’t-”

“You and me and my dad put all the paperwork in place to make Roxas your adopted brother,”

“That doesn’t sound right-”

“Terra, Aqua, and Ventus are setting up a network for Keyblade wielders,”

“Terra?! T-Terra’s not-”

“Axel’s adopted Xion, and Namine is my sister as much as Roxas is your brother,”

“But Kairi-”

“You kept all your promises, saved all these people.” Kairi silenced Sora with a look full of worry, “Sora, you’re still you, and you’re supposed to be here.”

Something seemed too perfect. Sora knew his hands were trembling.

“Riku’s down the beach collecting paopus, wanna join him?” Kairi asked. She then leaned in, stroking his cheek, “Xehanort’s gone, Sora, it’s just us. We’re free from all those adventures. The worlds are at peace.” She stood, dragging Sora with her, “Come on, Riku misses you.”

Sora followed, with one word lingering within him like poison and ringing like bells.

_Xehanort..._

...

Paopu juice drying on his chin. Sea salt in his nostrils and on his tongue. Wind in his hair and ears. Sea water dragging his clothes against his skin, Kairi humming a lullaby. His head was in her lap and Riku was holding his hand right next to him. 

“Feeling better, bud?” Riku asked.

Sora could feel the sunset washing over him, and he saw the dusky tones above. A bittersweetness; beautiful, but dying. Maybe this was how Roxas felt....

“I guess...” Sora muttered. There was a lingering taste in his mouth, an ache in him.

Kairi and Riku leaned over and kissed his forehead and cheek with a unanimous, “Good.”

Kairi went back to her humming, and slumber dragged the weary boy into its embrace.

...

Darkness and pillars of light and color. Serenity and the unknown. Voices crooning just outside the edge of discernible, low and hushed and soothingly worried. There was no ground, no water, no sky, just darkness and light. Colors swirled around him like shards of glass, sharp and dangerous but beautiful.

As always Sora’s dreams never seemed to make sense, but then again if this followed the pattern it would with just a little hindsight. Explanation would be more than welcome here in the chaos. Why if he really was home for a year he couldn't remember, why he kept feeling hurt, why, why, _why._

Sora felt his feet in the darkness, his head craning downward (upwards? or was he upside down?) to see the light. 

The light was bright, but it was also getting smaller and smaller.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> whoops Sora saw through all that in a heartbeat.


End file.
